Over the past month or so I’ve been getting awesome support and feedback from the community, looking for my next challenge in the business world – thank you friends!
As of today I’m still un-employed, but with couple of strong leads. Being home allowed me to take some time and figure out what I want to do next, and it also gave me more time to stay connected, blogging, twitting and sharing with people who’s opinion I value. One of the things I set to do is increase my visibility and creditability in Israel, post-IBM days, and as I learned at IBM, Hebrew can go a long way… 😉
As of yesterday I joined the writers team of Newsgeek.co.il – Yaniv Feldman and Niv Calderon, and my first post was aired today: ‘The mission: staying updated‘. As a blogger for newsgeek I’ll be covering social media, software, gadgets and cellular – and any other topic that has value to our readers (and I have something smart to say about). Juggling 2 blogs at the same time is a new task for me, and some of my posts at newsgeek.co.il might originate from here, but with a local twist of course. I’m not in the business of duplicating/translating content. Do hope you’ll find my articles interesting – share, rss and comment as you see fit.
Three months ago I sat down with some friends and they asked me how come their facebook page (news feed) is filled with updates from me. I responded by saying ‘I installed the twitter app in facebook, and now my updates on twitter appear as facebook status messages as well’. Everyone asked me ‘twitter what?!’ and I tried explaining it without sounding too geeky.. 😉
Last week the same friends asked me ‘what’s twitter good for?’ and ‘I’m thinking of opening up an account – can you help?’. Oh boy, the age of (twitter) innocence has passed. After this week’s battle between CNNBRK (CNN Breaking News) and Aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) it seems twitter is the new pet on the block and everyone wants one, including Oprah. And twitter has also showed some muscle, by disabling the ‘un-follow’ option from both CNNBRK and Aplusk, to not lose users after the battle is over..
Ashton attracts 1m followers because, in my opinion, he has access to mainstream media, and gives us (social-media-buffs) the feeling that we’re not alone in this (twittering).. I’ll probably won’t pay much attention to most of Ashton’s updates (except his ustream videos), but it’s good to know that the dude who’s married to Demi Moore is a social media geek just like us… 😉
What do you think? are you one of Aplusk’s followers? considering to be? has twitter lost its innocence?
It’s getting close people, and sometimes I think that only when it truly happens will I understand (and absorb) it fully. In 7 days I’ll be un-employed.
Only yesterday have I realized the potential of Israel as a hi-tech greenhouse, when attending Techonomy, an event focused on local innovation, produced by Orli Yakuel and sponsored by Sun Microsystems. Techonomy was the highlight of a socially packed week, which started last week with GarageGeeks (Wed), followed by Kinnernet (Thu-Sat), then TheMarker Com.Vention (Sun) and Jeff Pulver’s Breakfast (Tue), an hour before Techonomy. Until now I had little business interaction with the SU scene here, although I try to keep myself updated. I am aware we’re the #2 SU country in the world (after the US, with some 3,000 SU companies), but the solutions I sell are aimed at ‘older’ companies, so I rarely meet SU founders.
Personally I was psyched about face.com and their Photo Finder facebook application- face recognition has been around for some time now, but their technology brings it to every consumer, using our natural ‘sharing’ feeling, in a killer speed. They handed out some 50 invitations to techonomy attendees, which run out very fast. Do hope I’ll get approved to their alpha soon.
Another SU that got me interested is Vetrinas (Orit Hashay), which evolves around fashion. Living with a fashion-savvy girlfriend I can totally see this site kicking off, ’cause there are plenty of girls out there who would love to window-shop from their living room. Too bad the panel was male-only – there were a lot of ladies in the audience who could fit the panel, including TC‘s Sarah Lacy (super guest speaker).
Yoav Segal presented Hoody, a social site for your neighborhood, showing you at the heart of the circle, seeing what friends, business and news are happening around you.
Some of the online discussion was around the lack of a solid business model. In the current climate, you must have a business model before running to raise additional funds, or moving to beta, BUT, at an event like this – I’m willing to wait a few more weeks. Hoody and Vetrinas can do wonders with the right business model, face.com is already there I think – and someone (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon) will definitely put some $$$M for it.
Final word to the producers, Sun Startup Essentials and Orli Yakuel. I came to know the work Sun is doing via facebook, which is quite similar to IBM’s Global Technology Unit – reaching out to local hi-tech companies, and supporting through various initiatives. Kudos to Eddy Resnick for managing to allocate the budget for such an event, in such times, including catering (very good) and the venue itself (ZOA House). And last round of applause to Orli, for bringing Techonomy to life with some 300 participants (and 100 more in stand-by), to show some respect to the Israeli innovation that we knew existed here all along, regardless of what people might think.
As promised last week, you can read the full interview TheMarker held with my friend Arjan Radder, Social Software Sales Mgr., IBM Europe. Interviewed by Or Herschauna.
Arjan Radder, Social Software Sales Manager in IBM Europe, believes that a Social enterprise networks can have a crucial role in enhancing organizational efficiency.
By Or Herschauna
The first time Arjan Radder, who is responsible for social software sales in IBM Europe, heard that many IBM Israel employees have a Facebook profile he was surprised. “It’s very different for us in Holland,” said Radder who will attend and speak at the Internet convention: Com.Vention, organized by TheMarker on March 29.
A quick check indicates he is right. There aren’t any Dutch IBM employees in Facebook or, at least, not any employees who mentioned the name of the company for which they work. Radder quickly regains his composure. “It’s actually logical,” he says, “Facebook is very popular in Israel. In Holland, for example, most employees have a profile in LinkedIn network, a network with business links. People’s Facebook account in Holland is only for private use – family and friends.”
Radder’s role at IBM involves in leveraging the advantages of social networks in the enterprises.
“When web sites like LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook started to become popular we understand that we at the IBM, have actually been doing something similar for over a decade. For example, we have a network of employee profiles called Blue Pages, which is almost identical to LinkedIn. It is no simple matter to make communications in an organization of almost 500,000 employees efficient. We are spread out over the entire world and engage in fields with a large amount of knowledge. It was simply a matter of necessity for us,” he explains. “We also have 80,000 blogs at the company, ad 12,000 communities,” he adds.
As part of its use of the advantages of the open social networks IBM recently incorporated Lotus Connect and Beehive in its organizational social networks product.Beehive expands the standard user profile in IBM software and makes it similar to the Facebook profile. Beehive allows surfers to upload pictures and events to the profile, and to add comments to the profiles of other users. Radder finds it easy to explain the significance of social applications in an enterprise like IBM.
“Once, when I searched the Internet for something, I’d do it through the regular search engines and receive, at least, hundreds of results. Now I get two results – the first is the results from the general search engines, like Google, and the second is a result from the links that IBM employees uploaded to IBM’s shared tag web site, which is similar to the Delicious social tag site. In most cases the second result is more relevant to my purposes,” he explains.
Saving Search Time
Radder notes that in house research IBM carried out indicated an increase of 50% in employees satisfaction with the search results. “Moreover – not only do I only get relevant results I can also examine the ratings that the company employees gave to the link and, at the click of button, I can start a chat with someone who has already looked for the concept,” he continues. “Can you imagine how much search time is saved in an organization the size of IBM,” he asks.
Radder presents the advantages offered to the enterprises by social software. “Take, for example, the immediate message programs – this is one the easiest business examples. It is very easy to show the tremendous saving which organizations can obtain using such software, in terms of the cost of telephone calls and storage space for emails,” he explains. Nonetheless, he does not recommend the popular programs in this field, such as Microsoft’s Messenger or Yahoo, Skype or Google Talk. “There are regulatory requirements for information storage. For example, organizational solutions for social networks contain the users’ immediate messages for a period of around three years, as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (the law which requires public companies traded in the USA to report in-house company audits). We should thank our friends from Enron for this,” he adds jokingly.
“Until a few years ago organizations that wished to use social tools contacted the accepted Internet portals, simply because of the lack of alternatives. These tools, however, are simply not suitable for organizational needs,” he explains. The first and foremost reason for the lack suitability, according to Radder, relates to the inability to perform user identity verification in an appropriate manner in the open social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. “Moreover,” he explains, “there is, of course, a major problem of security and compatibility with the regulations.”
This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.
As of yesterday I joined the writers team of Newsgeek.co.il – Yaniv Feldman and Niv Calderon, and my first post was aired today: ‘The mission: staying updated‘. As a blogger for newsgeek I’ll be covering social media, software, gadgets and cellular – and any other topic that has value to our readers (and I have something smart to say about). Juggling 2 blogs at the same time is a new task for me, and some of my posts at newsgeek.co.il might originate from here, but with a local twist of course. I’m not in the business of duplicating/translating content.
